Chloride City, Arizona

Now
a ghost town, Chloride City was one of the earliest mining camps in the
Arizona Territory. Named for silver chloride ore, the town grew from the
Silver Hill strike of the 1860s. Reaching the isolated Silver Hill mines
required taking a river steamboat 300 miles upstream from Yuma to Hardyville
(near today's Bullhead City), and then crossing 38 miles of unforgiving
desert.

Chloride
was dangerous territory. In 1863, Hualapai Indians commandeered some
miner's guns, shooting one and killing two more by throwing rocks down their
mine shaft. But fortune seekers continued to come and by 1900, Chloride
City reached a population of 2,000.